Really? I tend to see competitive ability as a necessary foundation for productive cooperation. This is getting pretty vague, though.

What do you mean by competitive ability? The things he is talking about in the book is bluffing and psychological warfare. Are these useful skills when trying get something done cooperatively or do they harm the process if used?

The situations that we are least good at are cooperative situations

This seems difficult to conclude. Can you explain why you think this is true?

Possibly we mean different things by cooperative situations. I'm talking about situations where people have to work together to win, you can't just wipe out or ignore everyone else. This means balancing your goals with others, Competitive situations, especially the types of games talked about here, you know what needs to be done, This makes them simpler and easier to deal with.

I would assert there are many competitive elements to this issue.

You can treat solving global warming as having competitive elements, but then you will be less efficient at actually solving the problem by having to spend resources on competing, which could have been used for solving the problem.